Steven Smale

Steven is one of INTO’s founding directors and leads all student recruitment activity for the group.

Fluent in Chinese, Steven is one of the world’s leading practitioners in the management of large, distributed student recruitment networks. Under his leadership, INTO currently attracts more than 12,000 students per year from all over the world to their partners.

As director of the Global Recruitment Unit, Steven oversees the activities of over 130 staff operating out of 31 regional offices in 17 countries – ensuring that students and their advisors receive outstanding service supported by customer-focused processes, all enabled by the latest technology.

His time as an international student in Taiwan in 1990 and his long experience of living and working in China gives him an unparalleled perspective of the support needed by young people studying far from home, as well as a deep awareness of the value of studying overseas – all of which, he says, are vital to him in his role today.

Steven has built his career in counselling international students and developing the systems, processes and management structures which enable institutions to recruit at scale and to deliver services and experiences which international students, their families and their representatives expect.

After university where he studied Chinese and German, Steven worked for the Anglo-Taiwan Education Centre in Taibei. There he honed his Chinese language skills and helped to establish a body to promote education in the UK that resulted in a transformation in the number of students travelling from Taiwan from 38 to 2,500 per year.

Since then he has held senior management roles within the British Council and with Study Group as their Regional Director for China before founding INTO with John Sykes and Andrew Colin.